Contact (1997)

Which Route Upward, On a Wing or a Prayer?

If heaven exists, what does it look like? Is it a gleaming tropical beach with snow-white sand and turquoise surf watched over by a fireworks of wheeling golden stars?

''Contact,'' Robert Zemeckis's solemn two-and-a-half-hour reverie on religion, technology and the search for extraterrestrial life, has the temerity to imagine such a heaven. But it's a science-fiction heaven, a childhood vision of Pensacola, Fla., downloaded from the memory of Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), a brilliant young astronomer.

It's more than just a remembered vision, however. The spirits who inhabit this paradise materialize out of the ether like fragments of a mirage. When one of them plants a kiss on her cheek, he leaves a blister like the telltale burn on Mary Poppins after dancing with the Sun King. This surfside dream world is the place Ellie visits briefly when the half-trillion-dollar space vehicle built to carry her to the distant star Vega apparently malfunctions on its launching pad.

But was it a stress-induced hallucination, or a preview of an afterlife? ''Contact,'' a technologically dazzling but intellectually strained and emotionally chilly science-fiction epic, coyly refuses to say for sure.

The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality.

Or at least it tries to. In its best moments, ''Contact'' becomes the most visually intoxicating ''trip'' movie ever made. Countless earlier films have used kaleidoscopic effects to suggest being hurtled through a time and space warp, but ''Contact'' is the first to have a palette so intensely rich and a design so intricately vertiginous that the space travel sequences are breathtaking to the point of being slightly scary.

One debate running through ''Contact'' is whether modern technology has improved human life or has alienated people from one another by undermining their spiritual ties. What little emotional weight the movie succeeds in accumulating revolves around Ellie's ultimate conversion from rationalism (she can't bring herself to say she believes in God) to a kind of faith in something, although the film draws well short of naming it God.

But try as it might to convey a humanist, mystical message and to equate the search for extraterrestrial life with religious faith, ''Contact'' is much more convincing when worshiping at the cold shrine of technology. In scene after scene, the human characters are dwarfed by modern aerospace gadgetry. Rows of giant radio telescopes standing sentinel in the New Mexico desert wield more dramatic heft than any of the people using them. These scenes are crammed with complicated, intimidating jargon that is far more refined than the screenplay's long-winded, diluted spiritual musings.

More than any character, the camera, with its long, sweeping movements, rules the movie. In several large crowd scenes, it slowly draws back to coolly contemplate the human anthill below. The movie is also fond of showing its characters blabbing their theories, on multiple television screens, to the likes of Larry King. (This Warner Brothers film shamelessly and repeatedly plugs the Cable News Network, owned by Time Warner.) Why is it that these people are always much more believable when shown spooning out television sound bites than when conversing among themselves off camera?

Where science fiction movies, from the ''Star Wars'' trilogy to the ''Star Trek'' series, portray teams of space voyagers confidently flicking the controls of their vehicles and going into warp drive, ''Contact'' dwells on the ominous chill of all that machinery. When Ms. Foster is alone in the capsule that is supposed to transport her to Vega, you sense the metal walls closing in on her as she resists an attack of claustrophobia. It is a much more gripping moment than the flashbacks to the 9-year-old Ellie finding her father dead of a heart attack.

''Contact'' is basically her story. An intellectually precocious child devoted to picking up long-distance communications on her shortwave radio, she grows up to be an astronomer obsessed with discovering an extraterrestrial intelligence. Although Ms. Foster gives a strong, fiercely intelligent portrayal of a driven scientist, her character exhibits little vulnerability. Even when shedding tears, Ellie is shown fighting them back, clenching her jaw, determined to solve the next problem. She never really lets go.

Ellie is almost too noble to care about. After this fanatical careerist hits the jackpot and begins receiving elaborate coded messages from Vega, she remains strangely acquiescent to the scheming of her former boss (Tom Skerritt), a glib Presidential science adviser, who wants to take credit for her work and dump her from the project.

Her intellectual opponent in the movie's science-versus-religion debate is a handsome young minister named Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who is always popping up for no apparent reason and with whom she has a fleeting affair. A combative relationship that is supposed to have titanic implications comes down to a few desultory conversations and a couple of awkward embraces. Ms. Foster and Mr. McConaughey fail to generate a single romantic spark.

The role of Palmer, who calls himself ''a man of the cloth without a cloth,'' is so underwritten that he remains an enigma. It's hard to believe that this shambling long-haired Southerner has actually written a best-selling book and hangs out at the White House as an unofficial spiritual adviser. And all his talk about a life-changing epiphany isn't accompanied by any spiritual incandescence. The twinkle in his eye suggests the mischievous glint of a bored fraternity boy looking for the next wild party to crash.

Most of the movie's subsidiary characters are one-dimensional cartoons. The most far-fetched, S. R. Hadden (John Hurt), is a cranky multibillionaire and global wheeler-dealer who bears a vague resemblance to Howard Hughes. Hadden, who lives on a plane that almost never touches ground, appears to be both omniscient and infinitely wealthy, and Mr. Hurt plays him as a sort of amused modern-day Caligula capriciously pulling strings. James Woods puts on his best stormy scowl as a cynical national security adviser. Angela Bassett is largely wasted as a Presidential assistant. President Clinton appears in two scenes (stiffly morphed, ''Forrest Gump'' style, from televised appearances).

''Contact'' is at its most relaxed when it sheds its intellectual pretensions and reveals its media-wise sense of humor. When the news of a communication from outer space incites a media frenzy, thousands of loonies of every stripe converge in the New Mexico desert and set up their soapboxes. Among them is a lone Elvis impersonator who wears a sign, ''Viva las Vega.''

''Contact'' is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It includes one tepid bedroom scene.

CONTACT

Directed by Robert Zemeckis; written by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by Carl Sagan and the story by Mr. Sagan and Ann Druyan; director of photography, Don Burgess; edited by Arthur Schmidt; music by Alan Silvestri; production designer, Ed Verreaux; produced by Mr. Zemeckis and Steve Starkey; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 142 minutes. This film is rated PG.